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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I know it's a rant, but open source people do not know how to do user-friendly user interfaces. A few days ago, I posted the home page links for Diaspora, Gnu Social, and Friendica, and commented "any questions".

Blatant UI bugs often don't get fixed in open source. There's a bug in Ubuntu on some machines which causes the cursor to disappear after coming back from a suspend. (You can get the cursor back by typing CTL-ALT-F1 / CTL-ALT-F7.) The bug has been reported repeatedly for five years.[1]

With enough code bloat, all bugs are deep.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+cursor+disappears

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Definitely, but I look at it from the direction of "No one has pulled in the good UX/UI people to do open source work" and that's simply a social/culture problem.

I also think it's completely fixable, because all the reasons to do open source programming work apply to UI/UX work. Getting your work in front of a lot of people, gaining experience and notoriety, getting to scratch your own itch.

There just was no Linux for design people to jump start that culture. And Mac's always had such nice design that they didn't have as many itches to scratch.

Mainly because of culture differences.

Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Maya, Poser, you name it instead of constrain themselves to "worse is better" just to feel good.

So in the end, most don't feel the need to join any FOSS community and rather build their portfolio on online design galleries and magazines.

> Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Maya, Poser...

Doesn't Adobe continue to charge big $$$ for Creative Cloud? I don't understand how these statements mesh..

Yes it does.

"Don't bother" as in like most professionals they see a value in paying for their tools and don't mind having to pay them.

Just FYI that's basically opposite how the phrase "doesn't bother" is idiomatically used in at least American English.

Thanks for the hint. I am not native English speaker.

You want to say "are not bothered to pay for their tools"

I wouldn't say that ALL open source people don't know how to do UI/UX, but in my experience it's a stereotype that's rooted in a truth which is most BSD/GPL/Apache licensed software developers put greater emphasis on the backend of the code than the frontend UI/UX.

There are some notable exceptions of things that have great https/browser based UI: Take a look at Rainloop webmail for example.

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